Walter Cronkite, who pioneered and then mastered the role of television news anchorman with such plain-spoken grace that he was called the most trusted man in America, died Friday at his home in New York. He was 92.

From 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was a nightly presence in American homes and always a reassuring one, guiding viewers through national triumphs and tragedies alike, from moonwalks to war, in an era when network news was central to many people’s lives.

He became something of a national institution, with an unflappable delivery, a distinctively avuncular voice and a daily benediction: “And that’s the way it is.”

“He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator,” CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

Along with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Cronkite was among the first celebrity anchormen. In 1995, 14 years after he retired from the “CBS Evening News,” a TV Guide poll ranked him No. 1 in seven of eight categories for measuring television journalists. He was so widely known that in Sweden anchormen were once called Cronkiters.

Triumph, tragedy

As anchorman and reporter, Cronkite described wars, natural disasters, nuclear explosions, social upheavals and space flights, from Alan Shepard’s historic 15-minute ride to lunar landings. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, Cronkite exclaimed, “Oh, boy!”

On the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Cronkite briefly lost his composure in announcing that the president had been pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Taking off his black-framed glasses and wiping away a tear, he registered the emotions of millions.

It was an uncharacteristically personal note from a newsman who was uncomfortable expressing opinion.

“I am a news presenter, a news broadcaster, an anchorman, a managing editor — not a commentator or analyst,” he said in an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1973. “I feel no compulsion to be a pundit.”

But when he did pronounce judgment, the impact was large.

In 1968 he visited Vietnam and returned to do a rare special program on the war. He called the conflict a stalemate and advocated a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the broadcast, Cronkite wrote in his 1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life,” quoting a description of the scene by Bill Moyers, then a Johnson aide.

Cronkite sometimes pushed beyond the usual two-minute limit to stories. On Oct. 27, 1972, his 14-minute report on Watergate, followed by an eight-minute segment four days later, “put the Watergate story clearly and substantially before millions of Americans” for the first time, the broadcast historian Marvin Barrett wrote in “Moments of Truth?” (1975).

Cronkite began: “Watergate has escalated into charges of a high-level campaign of political sabotage and espionage apparently unparalleled in American history.”

In 1977, his separate interviews with President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel were instrumental in Sadat’s visiting Jerusalem. The countries later signed a peace treaty.

Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was born Nov. 4, 1916, in St. Joseph, Mo., the son of Walter Leland Cronkite Sr., a dentist, and the former Helen Lena Fritsche. His ancestors had settled in New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony that became New York.

As a boy, Walter peddled magazines door to door and hawked newspapers. As a teenager, after the family had moved to Houston, he got a job with The Houston Post as a copy boy and cub reporter, inspired to go into the news business by a high school journalism teacher. At the same time, he had a paper route delivering The Post to his neighbors.

Cronkite attended the University of Texas for two years, studying political science, economics and journalism, working on the school newspaper and picking up journalism jobs with The Houston Press and other newspapers. He also auditioned to be an announcer at an Austin radio station but was turned down. He left college in 1935 without graduating to take a job as a reporter with The Press.

At KCMO, Cronkite met an advertising writer named Mary Elizabeth Maxwell. The two read a commercial together. One of Cronkite’s lines was, “You look like an angel.” They were married for 64 years until her death in 2005.

Cronkite is survived by his daughters, Nancy Elizabeth and Mary Kathleen; his son, Walter Leland III, called Chip; and four grandsons.

After being fired from KCMO in a dispute over journalism practices he considered shabby, Cronkite in 1939 landed a job at the United Press news agency, now United Press International. He reported from Houston, Dallas, El Paso and Kansas City.

WW II reporter

The stint ended when he briefly returned to radio and then took a job with Braniff International Airways in Kansas City, selling tickets and doing public relations.

Returning to United Press after a few months, he became one of the first reporters accredited to U.S. forces with the outbreak of World War II. He gained fame as a war correspondent, crash-landing a glider in Belgium, accompanying the first Allied troops into North Africa, reporting on the Normandy invasion and covering major battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, in 1944.

In 1943, Edward R. Murrow asked Cronkite to join his wartime broadcast team in CBS’s Moscow bureau. In “The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism” (1996), Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson wrote that Murrow was astounded when Cronkite rejected his $125-a-week job offer and decided to stay with United Press for $92 a week.

That year, Cronkite was one of eight journalists selected for an Army Air Forces training program that took them on a bombing mission to Germany aboard B-17 Flying Fortresses. Cronkite manned a machine gun until he was “up to my hips in spent .50-caliber shells,” he wrote in his memoir.

After covering the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and then reporting from Moscow from 1946 to 1948 for the UP, he again left print journalism to become the Washington correspondent for a dozen Midwestern radio stations. In 1950, Murrow successfully recruited him for CBS.

Though he wanted to cover the Korean War, Cronkite was assigned to develop the news department of a new CBS station in Washington. Within a year he was appearing on nationally broadcast public affairs programs like “Man of the Week,” “It’s News to Me” and “Pick the Winner.”

In February 1953 he narrated the first installment of his long-running series “You Are There,” which recreated historic events like the Battle of the Alamo or the Hindenburg disaster and reported them as if they were breaking news. Sidney Lumet, soon to become a well-known filmmaker, directed the series, which included top actors like E.G. Marshall and Paul Newman.

In 1952, the first presidential year in which television outshined radio, Cronkite was chosen to lead the coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. By Cronkite’s account, it was then that the term “anchor” was first used — by Sig Mickelson, the first director of television news for CBS, who had likened the chief announcer’s job to an anchor that holds a boat in place. Paul Levitan, another CBS executive, and Don Hewitt, then a young producer, have also been credited with the phrase.

In 1961, Cronkite replaced Murrow as CBS’s senior correspondent, and on April 16, 1962, he began anchoring the evening news, succeeding Douglas Edwards, whose ratings had been low. As managing editor, Cronkite also helped shape the nightly report.

The famous signoff

The evening broadcast had been a 15-minute program, but on Sept. 2, 1963, CBS doubled the length to a half-hour, over the objections of CBS’s affiliates. Cronkite interviewed President John F. Kennedy on the first longer broadcast, renamed the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite.” He also broadcast from a real newsroom and not, as Edwards had done, from a studio set.

At the time the broadcast was lengthened, Cronkite inaugurated his famous signoff, “And that’s the way it is.”

Cronkite retired in 1981 at 65. He had repeatedly promised to do so, but few had either believed him or chosen to hear. CBS was eager to replace him with Dan Rather, who was flirting with ABC, but both Cronkite and the network said he had not been pushed.

After his retirement he continued to be seen on CBS as the host of “Walter Cronkite’s Universe,” a half-hour science series that began in 1980 and ran until 1982. The network also named him a special correspondent; the position turned out to be largely honorary, though news reports said it paid $1 million a year. But after he spent 10 years on the board of CBS, where he chafed at the cuts that the network’s chairman, Laurence A. Tisch, had made in a once generous news budget, more and more of his broadcast work appeared on CNN, National Public Radio and elsewhere, not CBS.

By the time Rather was leaving the “CBS Evening News” in 2005 after 24 years at the anchor desk, Cronkite had abandoned mincing words. He criticized his successor as “playing the role of newsman” rather than being one. Rather should have been replaced years earlier, he said.

TRIBUTE

CBS News will do a special tribute to Walter Cronkite on Sunday (7 p.m., Chs. 5, 46)

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